


Like a Nursery Rhyme in Braille

by victoria_p (musesfool)



Series: beggars would ride [5]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M, Genderswap, girl!Sam
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-09-05
Updated: 2007-09-05
Packaged: 2017-10-02 18:34:21
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,894
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9400
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/musesfool/pseuds/victoria_p
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Dean freaks out when Sam isn't where he left her, and Sam freaks out when she gets back from her trip through the looking glass. Companion piece to <a href="http://musesfool.livejournal.com/1418838.html"><cite>Double Vision</cite></a>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Like a Nursery Rhyme in Braille

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Laura for betaing. [all Teand's fault](http://musesfool.livejournal.com/1418838.html?thread=28342102#t28342102). Title from Thea Gilmore.

It's not like Dean has some kind of spidey-sense or something--one freaked out psychic in the family is more than enough, as far as he's concerned--but he's been looking after Sam since he was four, and by now, he's got a finely honed sense of where she is, and, more importantly, where she isn't.

And a quick sweep of the bar shows that she's not where he left her an hour ago. He takes a deep breath and tries to ignore the way his gut roils in fear at her absence, and all the possible reasons for it. He pulls out his phone, dials quickly.

"You better be in the can," he says to her voicemail, mostly succeeding at keeping the fear out of his voice.

He hovers outside the ladies room for a minute or two, contemplates asking one of the women who pass him on the way in and out to check, and then shoves the door open himself.

"Sam? Sammy?" There are three women crammed around two sinks in the small pink room, and two stalls with closed doors. He bangs on each of them in turn as the three women glare at him for invading their tiny space and the chicks in the stalls curse him out. "Sam? Sammy?" He grins, hating the way it feels wild and scared on his face, like he's barely keeping control. It could become a snarl of rage at any second. "My sister," he says as he backs out. "She can't hold her liquor."

He tries her phone again, hangs up without leaving a message, one hand tight on the wheel as he fishtails out of the parking lot and onto the road back to the motel.

"Sam?" he calls as he slams the key into the lock and then the door into the wall, but she's not in the room. He has to fight back nausea, because there's nowhere else she could be; she was fine when he left her, and now she's gone and it's all his fault. Again. He does a quick survey and sees that her stuff is still there. On the one hand, that means she didn't plan to disappear, that she's not running away again, and part of him--the part that keeps expecting her to ditch his ass somewhere in East Bumfuck and not look back (the part of him that thinks that might not be the worst idea ever, either)--is relieved; on the other, that means she was probably taken or possessed, and he's got no real clue which it is. Either way, whoever's got her is going down hard.

It doesn't take him long to strap on an arsenal and head back out. He checks his phone constantly, but there are no messages, and hers just turns over to voicemail every time he tries it. It's too soon to call Bobby and Ellen, but he does anyway. Neither of them have heard from her.

He drives, needing to be on the move; he heads back to the cemetery, retracing their steps. The mausoleum is as quiet as they left it, and he stares at the runes carved around the door, which glow faintly in the darkness, and he's pretty sure it's not because of lichen. That pale green light is the only thing keeping him from kicking the door in and shooting the place up--if Sam's trapped inside, he doesn't want to do anything that will seal it up before he gets her out.

He wishes he'd brought the laptop with him so he could look the runes up, research the owners of the crypt, before he realizes that there probably isn't any signal to steal. Not much need for wifi where these folks have gone. His laugh is hollow and his stomach is in knots when he heads back to the motel.

He spends a couple of hours reading about various runes on the internet, and even with everything he's seen in his life, he still finds the idea of portals to alternate universes hard to believe. He remembers some of his father's theories--stuff he and Pastor Jim used to kick around after they'd had a couple of beers--and all the metaphysical crap Sam likes to talk about at three o'clock in the morning when she can't sleep and they're too bone-tired to fuck, and the hours stretch out endlessly ahead of them. He's never believed in any of it, all of it a little too SciFi Saturday Night Movie to be real, though what he remembers from high school physics doesn't preclude the possibility.

He heads back to the cemetery and settles down on the grass in front of the mausoleum, waiting for the sun to rise. In addition to the shotgun and his nine millimeter, he's got the twenty-pound sledge from the trunk, ready to bust down the door if he can't kick it in, and Sam's not back by morning.

He dozes as the sky lightens, and his jeans are wet from dew when he wakes up, the sun over the horizon, the air fresh with spring and birdsong. He hauls himself up, stiff from spending the night on the cool, damp ground, and finds a flowerbed to piss in, not wanting to desecrate any graves that might house angry spirits waiting for a reason to rise.

He's still working the kinks out of his back when the birds go silent. He whips his gun out as the runes gleam and the air shimmers, chiming like church bells.

Sam stumbles out of the doorway, eyes and mouth wide in surprise.

"Dean," she says, clutching at him.

He puts the gun away and hauls her in, hands roaming over her shoulders, down her arms, making sure she isn't hurt. "You all right?"

"I am now," she says, wrapping her arms around his waist and tipping her face up for a kiss. He obliges, tongue licking hungrily into her mouth, which tastes of heat and toothpaste. Her hands slide up under his shirt, warm and demanding on his skin, and her kisses have that frantic edge to them they sometimes get when they've skirted too close to death, or when she's afraid he's changed his mind, doesn't want her anymore.

"Sam--"

"Dean, _please_." Her voice is rough, desperate, needy in a way that sends a jolt right to his dick, but also tells him that whatever happened inside that mausoleum has got her really riled up.

He rubs circles on her back, waiting for his own heart rate to slow, relief making him almost giddy. "Easy, baby," he murmurs, because one of them has to be calm. "Let's get back to the motel, and you can tell me all about it." He wraps an arm around her shoulders, gathers up his gear, and steers her away from the mausoleum, which crouches sullenly in the soft morning light, glow from the runes fading slowly. He wants to get her away from here, just in case the thing decides it wants her back.

Once they're in the car, she slides all the way over, nestles up against him like she used to as a kid, and he slings his arm around her shoulders again, breathing her in. The shampoo is wrong--cheap and flowery, like the stuff the motel provides instead of the stuff she makes him buy--but underneath she's still familiar, still _Sam._

"So?" he says.

"The runes open a portal to...I guess it's an alternate universe?" She doesn't sound convinced, or maybe she sounds like she knows he won't believe her. "I met us, there."

"Us?" he asks slowly, glancing at her, but she's staring straight ahead, eyes unreadable.

"Yeah. We were--We were us, except in the ways we weren't."

Okay, that's weird even for them, which explains why she's so freaked out. He goes for the easy joke, tries to reestablish their familiar rhythm. "I was still incredibly good-looking, though, right?"

She snorts with surprised laughter, but snaps back, quick as ever, "You were still incredibly obnoxious." She pushes a hand through her hair, quickly sober again. "I was--I didn't even realize it wasn't you until--" She swallows hard. "You didn't know me."

Cold fear shivers down his spine, replacing the quick flare of hurt that she hadn't known it wasn't him. She'd known immediately in St. Louis, when it had mattered, when it really hadn't been. "What kind of crappy universe is that? Did I have amnesia or something?" He refuses to consider any of the other possibilities, concentrates on guiding the car into the parking spot in front of their motel room.

Her laugh this time is shakier. "No. There was already a Sam there, and you--the other you--knew him." She twirls a lock of hair around her finger, turns to look out the window, and it takes a couple of seconds for her words to sink in.

"Wait, what? The other you--You were a _guy_?"

She nods. "Did you ever--You must have wanted a little brother."

"Never," he answers, the lie falling smoothly, immediately off his tongue. He had. He remembers that pretty clearly, and the disappointment he'd felt when not only hadn't Mom and Dad brought one home, he'd gotten a whining, wrinkly baby sister instead, who couldn't do anything but shit and cry and sleep.

She turns to look at him, and her eyes are bright in a way that makes him hate himself even more than usual. "Liar."

He brushes a finger along the curve of her cheek. "Okay, maybe I'd kinda sorta hoped for a little brother, and when Mom and Dad brought you home, I maybe tried to convince Jimmy Kendall from down the block to trade one of his baby brothers for you."

She laughs, a sniffly, wet sound, but still a laugh, and though her eyes are kind of swimmy, no tears have spilled over. "I can't believe you were gonna trade me for a Kendall twin."

"And some toys to be named later," he says, trying to keep the mood light. After Mom died, he'd mostly stopped wishing. When she was a teenager, he'd wondered if it would have been easier with a brother, since then he never would have been tempted, but he'd never really wanted her any other way than as she was. He hasn't thought of it in years.

She puts her hand on his face, draws him in for a kiss, her mouth hot and hungry under his, demanding a response. "I need you to fuck me," she says against his jaw. "I need you to fuck me right now, Dean." She says his name like she's afraid he'll say no, like she's ready to beg if she has to, and while normally he'd be all over that, teasing her about how much she wants him, now it rubs like sandpaper against already raw nerves.

"It's okay, Sammy, I've got you," he says, falling back on the standard formula, mouth on autopilot while his brain tries to figure out how to make this better. "Let's get inside. I don't feel like giving the world a free show."

She looks away, nods, ducks her head, and when she gets out of the car, she's hunched in on herself, something she only does when she's hurt or guilty.

As soon as he shuts the door, she's undressing him, long, quick fingers unbuttoning his shirt, mouth against his jaw, the sensitive skin of his throat, stopping only long enough to yank her own shirt up over her head. The cheap white lace of her bra has started to fray from being washed too many times--Gotta go shopping soon, he thinks vaguely--and it's soft beneath his fingers when he pushes it out of the way to palm her breasts.

She moans and arches into the touch, her fingers hooking into his belt loops to pull him closer, walk them both back towards the bed. He knows he should say something, slow it down, find out what's really wrong, because after everything that's happened in the past year, meeting herself in an alternate universe and finding out she's a guy there doesn't seem all that traumatic. At the very least, he should salt the room, just in case, like he's been doing since she came back possessed, though even that doesn't let him relax anymore unless she's in the room with him, preferably curled up in the bed with him, but her skin is warm and soft under his fingers, and the weight of her breasts real against his palms. This is the fastest, surest way to prove she's here and safe--the sharp nip of her teeth on his jaw and the rough comfort of her tongue licking the sting away, the slick heat of her mouth around his tongue a precursor to the slick heat of her cunt around his dick, holding him deep within her body.

Everything else can wait.

They tumble backwards onto the bed. She's already shimmying out of her jeans and kicking them onto the floor, one advantage of the flipflops she insists on wearing when they're not actually on a hunt, and then her hands are on his fly, and he wants to laugh, because usually he's the one who can't wait, who's got her stripped and spread open in five minutes flat, and she's the one reminding him that a girl would like some foreplay occasionally, and she can't believe he ever got laid when she wasn't around. But her desperation is too obvious, and his panic still too close to the surface, to make jokes roll easy off his tongue.

"Lemme get my boots off," he says, hoping the affectionate exasperation in his voice covers up the fear that's still simmering in his veins.

She nods, lies back against the pillow, one hand sliding down her belly to curl between her legs as she watches him, eyes wide and green in the yellow light. Her full lower lip is caught between her teeth as she touches herself, her pretty pink cunt the best thing he's seen all day, but her eyes don't flutter closed, and there's something anxious in the way she's focused on him.

He steps out of his jeans and kicks them aside, crawling onto the bed to kneel above her. She wraps an arm around his neck and pulls him down on top of her, slipping her glistening fingers into his mouth so he can taste her, salty and sharp as the ocean, and twice as inexorable.

"Sam." He grabs her wrists, stretches her arms above her head. "Slow down. We've got all day."

She stills beneath him, and for a second he thinks he's gone too far, but then he hears the hitch in her breath, the shaky inhale and exhale that comes right before the soft begging that makes his dick ache to be inside her.

"Dean, please," she says, eyes gone soft and unfocused, the fear in them dissolving into need. He loosens his grip on her wrists and she says, "No, don't. I want you to--" She looks away, embarrassed, something she hasn't done since she was a teenager. She shifts beneath him, planting her feet flat on the bed and pushing up against him so he can feel how wet and hot she is.

"I'm not hurting you?"

"No." She's still rubbing up against him, eyes closed and breathing ragged. "It feels...good."

He lets go long enough to snag a condom off the night table, curls her fingers around the bottom of the headboard, and she stays that way without complaint, the elegant curve of her body breathtaking, enough to make him stop and really _look_ at her for the first time in a long time. He still can't believe how lucky he is, tries not to think about it too much; he doesn't want to tempt fate or whatever else is out there and might develop even more of a hate-on for his family.

"You don't have to," she says, pointing her chin at the condom, but he's not willing to take that risk, either.

He cups her cheek, strokes her lower lip, swollen from their kisses and red from the way she's been chewing on it, with his thumb. "Yeah, I do."

He skims his hands up her body, the rise of her abdomen, the flat plane of her belly, the perfect curves of her breasts, kisses every scar he can reach, up to and including the brand on the inside of her forearm, licks the raised skin slowly, like he can learn something new from it, even as he knows her body as well as his own, can map it blindfolded, in the dark, by fingertip and tongue alone. She quivers beneath him, breath hitching and sighing, pink-tipped breasts begging for his attention. She arches up into his mouth, soft litany of please and god falling from her lips, the only time he's ever actually heard her pray.

Her voice breaks on the hard syllable of his name, the command to stop teasing, so he takes hold of her wrists again, wrapping one hand around them to hold her fast. She relaxes beneath him when he does, inexplicable as it seems.

"Come on, Dean, fuck me," she says, smiling now. He leans in and shuts her up with a kiss, uses his other hand to open her up, stroke along the slick folds of her cunt and flick at her clit before he pushes inside. She surges up to meet him, body arching and breath hot and shallow in his mouth.

He fucks her hard, making the bed squeak and rattle, headboard banging against the wall. He leaves small red marks along her collarbone, stubble-burn on the curve of her neck. He misses the touch of her hands on his shoulders, the sting of her nails scraping down his back, but she asked, so he doesn't let go, holds her wrists and presses her down into the mattress with his weight and every thrust of his hips. He shifts her hips up so he can go deeper, listens to the desperate, choking sounds she makes, Fuck, and please, and Dean, before the words are lost completely.

She's hot and tight around him. "So wet," he murmurs in her ear, his own breathing ragged, "so fucking tight, gonna fuck you all day, gonna come so hard inside you, you'll feel me forever." She moans in response, low and needy. He can tell by the tension in her thighs, the rapid, shallow rhythm of her breathing, the way she tightens around him, that she's close, and he's not far behind, hunger licking down his spine like fire. "Come on, baby," he says, "Come for me now." He circles her clit roughly, and she comes apart, shuddering beneath him, cunt flexing hard around his dick, pulling him right along with her. The world goes white behind his eyes, pleasure pulsing through him until he thinks he might die of it, whole body nothing but nerve endings sparking like live wires in the rain, and he holds her as if she's the only thing keeping him alive.

When they're both done and caught in the mellow drift of afterglow, he tries to roll away, and she hooks her feet around his calves. "Let me," she says, twisting her wrists inside his grip, and he releases her, ears burning in shame at the red marks on her skin. But she doesn't complain, doesn't rub at them like they hurt. Instead, she wraps her arms around him and buries her face in the crook of his neck. He can feel her breath, warm and humid even against his sweaty skin.

"Just let me get rid of the condom," he says, and she mutters but lets him go long enough to tie it up and toss it out. When he attempts to lie down beside her, she pulls him back on top of her again, seems to breathe easier when he's covering her body with his own.

"You wanna tell me what this is all about?" he says. She can't be comfortable with his weight pressing her down, but she resists the first time he tries to roll onto his side and take her with him, only giving in when he doesn't stop trying. If he weren't still a little freaked at her behavior, he'd laugh at the way she always has to do things on her own terms.

She reaches up, runs a finger over his eyebrows, down the bridge of his nose; she tugs his lower lip with her thumb before sucking it between hers, a gesture familiar as breathing now, but it always makes him think of the first time she did it--the heat of the summer, the deck of cards scattered all over the bed, and her sixteen-year-old arrogance masking insecurity as she asked him for things neither of them should have ever wanted.

"You didn't--the other you--I wanted--" She's not usually so inarticulate, either, but then he figures it out, has to tamp down a hot flare of anger and jealousy. Christ, how fucked up is it that he's jealous of _himself_?

"You wanted to fuck the other me," he says, trying to keep his voice flat.

"No, I wanted to fuck _you_."

"But he wasn't--"

She grunts in frustration. "I knew he wasn't you, exactly, but he _was_. He was Dean and I--I wanted to feel--" She scritches her fingers through his hair, thumbs the arch of his cheek, doesn't say, like Sam. She doesn't have to--it's the only way that sentence can end and still make sense. She takes a deep breath, and her voice is steady when she says, "I wanted to feel the way you make me feel."

"He didn't go for it."

She laughs, but there isn't any humor in it. "He freaked. The way you did when we first started. Said he knew things were jacked up when we were growing up, but they were never this weird."

He has to swallow down the hot rush of shame that accompanies her words, still hears it in his voice, rough and low. "He's not wrong." And yet.

She shoves him onto his back, glares down at him. "He is. You've never hurt me, not intentionally. You never would." He looks pointedly at the red marks on her wrists, and she laughs for real this time. "That so doesn't count." She leans in, kisses him softly. "I needed to know that you still--" She looks away, and he realizes he can't make her finish that sentence.

"I do," he says. "I always will."

"Good." She smiles and kisses him again. "Me, too." She settles back down into the crook of his arm, resting her head on his chest, and yawns, already half-asleep.

He lies awake a little while longer, trying not to think about how he's fucked everything to hell, because she's still here, she _wants_ to be here, with him, and that's all he really cares about. When he sleeps, he doesn't dream, and when he wakes up, Sam is still there, nestled against him, warm and safe, and in the end, that's what really matters.

end

~*~


End file.
